Projects

Digital Application of Memristor:

Due to the huge challenges in the continuous scaling of technology, there is a need to search for alternatives that are compatible with CMOS and can provide high performance in nanoscale dimension, especially in memories due to the enormous data storage required for many applications. Memristor-based technology offers a feasible solution for post-CMOS memories and reconﬁgurable analog modules, which are essential in modern electronics and systems-on-chip (SOC). One of the main challenges is the memristor-based digital applications such as: logic gates, adders, multipliers, RAM, ROM, as well as the conventional flash memory. The advantages of using the memristor in arithmetic operations are related to the advantages related to power consumption, and area. A very powerful advantage of the memristor is its ability to change its resistance to represent multi-states and that allows us to implement multilevel digital adders that is much more energy efficient. The memristor is just a passive two terminal resistor that can remember the charge that is passing through it. After more than 30 years, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced the fabrication of the first memristor in 2008. Such an element with its great potential for being a passive nano-scale element with storing capability became an interesting topic of research. Due to the future limitation on semiconductor industry as well as that decreasing the feature size of the transistor became more hard which will lead eventually to collision with the physical limitation of mother nature. Thus, scientists and engineers started working on other new possibilities to improve the performance of the electronic circuits by using new elements or devices that are compatible with the old technology. One of the proposed methods is to replace the old technology with a new one with more potential in long term industry. It has been shown that using hybrid architecture between metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) and crossbar memristor could lead to huge improvement in function density. This architecture could reach up to two orders of magnitude higher than using the traditional CMOS under the same design rules, the same power and the comparable logic delay. Nowadays, using the memristor to perform arithmetic or logical operations has become a trend. Different papers introduced different approaches based on the memristor to perform arithmetic and logic operations either by using the memristor to perform analog addition, subtraction and multiplication or by creating digital circuits based on implication concept or stateful logic. As well as using charge accumulation to identify different levels which was introduced in explaining how to create different binary logic circuits based on normalized charge of the memristor.

Analog Application of Memristor:

The memristor has proved its importance through many applications, because of its unique behavior and hysteresis loop characteristics, specially the analog application such as Memristor-Based Oscillator, Programmable Analog Circuits, Adaptive filters, neuromorphic circuits and chaotic circuits. Recently, memristive oscillators are a significant topic in the nonlinear circuit theory. As many research papers are presented to discuss the memristor inside the oscillator circuits. Thanks to the time varying property of memristors, it becomes possible to build relaxation oscillator without existence of reactive elements. Oscillators are widely used in electronic applications such as timing circuits, modulation, test and measurement. Oscillators rely on reactive elements as capacitors and inductors to realize oscillation. The well-known Wien oscillator based memristive circuit was presented where the resistors are replaced by memristors. The properties of the memristor enable the circuit to maintain sustained oscillations. Modeling for the memristor-based Wien oscillator was discussed. The realization of a parametric oscillation as autonomous linear time variant system has been introduced. The memristor replaced a reactive element such as a capacitor or an inductor in the relaxation oscillators . The memristor can be used to mimic the charging, and discharging of the reactive elements, where the memristance can be increased or decreased. Therefore, the memristor is considered as a resistance-storing element. The concept of voltage controlled memristor based relaxation oscillator with the use of one memristor was discussed . The oscillator memristive circuits are suitable to be integrated on chip because of the nano-dimensions memristor on contrary with the reactive elements which are running into large area or assembled off chip.

Fruits Bio-impedance Aging Effect:

The fruit and vegetable growing industry is a large world-wide industry related to many other sectors including the food-shipping industry, food-processing and food-packaging industries. The demand for fresh fruits and fresh vegetables is continuously on the rise. The detection of fruit ripening is critical to all sub-sequent chain of events and related industry. Thus far, advanced wireless and IC technology has not penetrated the fruit and vegetable market except in very little aspects related to the monitoring of the storing and transportation conditions for fresh fruits. This includes monitoring of the humidity and temperature conditions in which the fruits are located without measuring the actual properties of the fruit tissues.The purpose of this project is to develop a miniature bio-impedance measurement device equipped with a wireless transmitter for the real-time monitoring of the growth rate and ripening of various fruits in field. Bioimpedance is a form of relating biological tissue properties to a standard electrical circuit model with measurable parameters.

Lighting Accelerator for Mobile GPU Shader in 3D Graphics

This project presents the design and implementation of lighting accelerator for 3D Graphics Vertex and Pixel Shading. In the Phong Illumination, Ambient, diffuse, and specular are computed in Log domain. Log unit converts the computation from 32b floating point to 32b fixed point and the opposite for anti-log. A sparse-tree fixed-point adders, a signed fixed-point multiplier, and Carry Look-ahead Adder (CLA) are used in combination to speed up the lighting accelerator operations. The proposed light accelerator is designed using Verilog and verified using Xilinx Virtex-5 XC5VLX50T FPGA.

Phong Illumination for vertex and pixel shading.

Implementation of the Izhikevich Neuron Model on the FPGA

This project generalizes Izhikevich neuron model in the fractional domain. This extends the system into more space so that more parameters can be used to describe the neuron dynamics. Neuron synchronization plays an important role in the process of information exchange among coupled neurons. The synchronization of two Izhikevich neurons is then studied at different fractional orders. Furthermore, the fractional-order regular spiking neuron of Izhikevich model is implemented on FPGA using combinational logic. This allows for rapid hardware prototyping of the model to be then used in large scale neural network simulations. FPGAs are known for their re-configurability and parallelism which makes them suitable candidate for further studies on neuronal control.

Fractional-Order Generalization of the Current mode circuits applications

A generalized fractional-order form of different current mode circuit applications such as simulated inductors, filters and oscillators are being studied in this project. Current mode circuits such as current conveyors have gained a significant attention due to its greater bandwidth, better slew rate, and higher speed than classic voltage-mode op-amps, which is limited by a constant gain-bandwidth product. These circuits are analyzed mathematically in the fractional order domain, taking into consideration the effect of the parasitic impedance and the non-idealities. This work is extended to doing circuit simulations and experimental work using AD844 chip to validate the functionality of the proposed circuits and the theoretical analysis.

Applications for Fractional Order Systems:Fractional Order PID controller

The fractional order calculus is a branch of calculus in which it studies the properties of the characteristic equations in generalized form. This project discuss the basic concepts of fractional order calculus, realization, and simple example of fractional PID controller as an application. One of the main advantages of this controller is the added extra degrees of freedom where the conventional PID is a special case. The effect of the fractional order parameter on the system response was illustrated using Matlab simulations for different orders.

Smart Rapid Prototype (SmaRP)

The project aims to introduce and deploy revolutionary ideas to improve the manufacturing sector in Egypt. State of the art technologies such as, Big Data and IoT (Internet of Things), will be integrated with manufacturing machines used in production process. The integration of technology with the manufacturing machine leads to higher efficiency with reduced long-term operation cost. The SmaRP project aims to help the Egyptian designers and manufacturers to benefit from the current technological advances. There will be main design centers which will receive the designs from the customers. During the initialization phase of the project, the main manufacturing centers will be located at Nile University and Cairo University. Each customer will have a terminal connected over the cloud to the design centers.